O que se pode entender por instabilidades da linguagem: Uma visão linguístico-discursiva

Abstract

I present characteristics of what I conceptualize as language instabilities. To this end, I analyze thirty years of my academic trajectory, highlighting three key moments in the development of this concept. It encompasses phenomena observed in speech, in writing, and in their interrelations. In the first moment, the instabilities referred to the duration of pauses in the speech of Parkinson’s patients, when the locus of investigation was the textual–interactive perspective. In the second moment, the instabilities came to refer to the functioning of other hesitative markers, still in the speech of Parkinson’s patients—but with a shift in the locus of investigation, from the textual–interactive perspective to the French-oriented discourse one. Finally, in the third moment, the instabilities essentially referred to the non-coincidences of language with itself, in the speech and writing of children. Once again, the locus of investigation was the French-oriented discourse perspective. I explain the functioning of this set of data, encompassed by the concept of language instabilities, as stemming from tensions within language—between attempts to organize the discursive flow (that is, to structure it) and the element of chance that is constitutive of it.